Work and pay in the United States and Japan

In Work and Pay in the United States and Japan, authors Clair Brown, Yoshifumi Nakata, Michael Reich, and Lloyd Ulman provide an integrated and detailed analysis of the employment and wage systems in the United States and Japan. Drawing on data obtained from fieldwork in comparable establishments in these two countries, as well as from national sources, this work examines the relationship between company practices and national economic institutions. The authors address a number of key questions about employer-employee relations. How have major Japanese manufacturing companies been able to convert the assurance of "lifetime" employment security into a source of superior employee efficiency and adaptability, when job and income security have been feared as a source of "shirking" and wage inflation in the United States? How have higher economic and real wage growth rates been associated with greater equality in earned income distribution in Japan, when the incentive role of income inequality to worker effort and savings has been stressed in the United States? How could Japanese emphasis on employment security in the firm be reconciled with greater price stability and lower unemploymen